Print shops are typically medium or large scale facilities capable of supplying printing services to meet a variety of customer demands. For example, print shops are often used to print documents used for mass-mailing (e.g., customer bills, advertisements, etc). Because print shops engage in printing on a scale that is hard to match, their customer base is usually varied. Print shop clients may therefore include both large institutional clients (e.g., credit card companies and banks), and small clients (e.g., small businesses and churches).
Print shops are generally arranged to print incoming jobs from clients in a way that is economical, yet fast. Thus, print shops often include a number of high-volume printers capable of printing incoming jobs quickly and at high quality. Print shops also typically include post-processing devices that are used to process the printed documents of each job (e.g., stackers, staplers, cutters, binders, etc.). Because print shops serve a variety of clients, they are often tasked with printing jobs that have varying printing formats, delivery dates, and media requirements. Print shops therefore often use a centralized print server that coordinates activity between printers of the print shop and clients. The print server schedules incoming jobs and forwards them to the printers they are directed to.
Printers of a print shop may be managed by operators who set up the printers and schedule jobs to queues for the printers. Unfortunately, user error by a print operator remains a problem during the scheduling of print jobs at a print server. In particular, a print operator may attempt to schedule a print job to a queue for a printer that is not properly configured to print the incoming job (e.g., the printer may not have the type of media that is required by the print job). If a print job reaches the front of a queue for a printer that is not properly configured, the printer may either misprint the print job, or detect an error and halt printing, thereby delaying the workflow of the print shop. Thus, it remains a problem for print operators to properly schedule jobs on printers.